We wanted to give you a quick rundown on the latest developments with InviteBox. Hope you don’t mind!

Instead of using the summertime to have some rest like most normal people do, we made a grand push to improve InviteBox both for you and, more importantly, for your customers. Here are the updates we have made so far:

New and Better Widget UI and UX

As our vision of an ideal referral program widget matured thanks to your fantastic feedback, we were able to invest more effort into crafting a better visual design and more appropriate end-user workflow. We’ll let the design speak for itself.

The new workflow requires that the user “signs in” using their email address before participating in a goal-based or contest campaign. This gives the user an option to refer their friends without posting on social networks if they wish so and allows them to see their status/results from any computer (versus the old cookie-based system where they could only access it from the same browser).

New Campaign Type: Referral Contest

In addition to instant and goal-based reward campaigns InviteBox now allows you to hold referral contests among your customers. A referral contest is a type of promotion where participants compete with each other on the number of referrals brought to you and the winner(s) receives a valuable prize. To try out referral contests, go to your account, click “Add Campaign” and choose referral contest as the campaign type. Or if you just want to see what it looks like for the end user, check out live demo at the bottom of this page.

Two-sided Incentives

It has been common knowledge in the industry for a while (pioneered by PayPal) that offering a bonus to the referral (in addition to the usual referrer reward) greatly improves the campaign performance. This is most likely so because of two factors: the referrer gets an extra motivation since they are now sharing something exclusive with their friends and the referral feels extra pressure to accept since they are being offered a gift.

While it has always been possible to set this up manually, now you can have InivteBox handle everything automatically for you. To use two-sided incentives in your campaign, go to “Reward” tab in the campaign settings, check “Reward the referral” and upload a spreadsheet with coupon codes. Now every time someone clicks a referral link to your website they’ll be first directed to a screen with unique coupon code. Don’t forget to adjust the labels in the “Appearance” tab!

SSO (Single Sign-On)

If your website already uses authentication you can use the new SSO API to automatically log the user into InviteBox as well. This way they can immediately access their referral dashboard without having to enter their email address. Check out the API documentation for more details.

Improved dashboard and analytics

Now you can see your campaigns’ key performance metrics right away in your account dashboard. The detailed analytics section has also became less cluttered and more informative. Check it out in your account!

If you have any comments or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line or leave a comment below. We’ll be glad to hear from you. Seriously.